


the morning crossword

by cosimamanning



Series: the consequences of nurture [3]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Crossword Puzzles, Vague References to the Other Clones, good parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 04:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11821665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosimamanning/pseuds/cosimamanning
Summary: People assume a lot of things about Krystal, but they’re hardly ever true.





	the morning crossword

**Author's Note:**

> ok yeah if you've just come from the beth fic -- i like to think as little krystal as sort of the antithesis of beth, what beth could have been if she had a father who wasn't an abusive asshole, because the whole purpose of the leda clones was to see what the consequences of nurture were in the first place, and the two of them are so similar yet so different and so i assumed it must have been rooted somewhere in their childhoods, and this is what came from that
> 
> also i love krystal, shoutout to norma, the real life krystal goderitch, for inspiring some of this and yelling to keep me motivated, much love xoxo

Krystal dangles upside-down from her father’s pull-up bar and stares at her basset hound, Theo. Theo stares back, tongue lolling, and Krystal rolls her eyes at him, pushing hair out of her face so that they can continue their impromptu staring contest. 

His ears, drooping and long, look funny from this position. 

“What on  _ earth  _ are you doing?” Krystal peers up at her mother and Theo thumps his tail thinking he’s won, and Krystal pouts. 

“Well, I  _ was  _ winning a staring contest ‘till you interrupted,” she responds, matter-of-factly, and her mother just looks back at her, unimpressed, hands on her hips. She’s a lot less fun to stare at than Theo. 

“You’re going to fall and break your neck,” her mother sighs, exasperated, “have you decided you’re going to be a monkey, now?”

“ _ No _ ,” Krystal huffs, still hanging despite her mother’s half-hearted protests, “I’m trying to think.”

“And hanging upside-down is helping with that somehow?”

“Dad says that it makes you think better,” Krystal quips, “and I’m trying to think of a word that’s five letters long and means,  _ to wait _ and starts with a ‘q’, so I need to hang.” Her cheeks are flushed bright red at this point and her mother pinches at the bridge of her nose, looking skyward as though searching for some divine help. 

“The word you’re looking for is  _ queue _ , so you can stop your little acrobatic endeavor.” Before she can protest, her mother gently untangles her legs from the bar and flips her around before setting her feet on the ground, and Krystal wobbles, dizzy. 

Theo makes a happy  _ boof  _ and wags his tail and moves next to her legs as though to support her, and Krystal rewards him with a scratch behind his big, floppy ears. 

“How do you spell that?”

“Q-u-e-u-e.”

“That’s dumb,” Krystal decides, walking with her mother back to the kitchen, Theo following with his nose to the floor, following some invisible trail, “the last four letters are silent. Why don’t they spell it with just the letter.”

“You can’t spell words with just one letter.”

“What about ‘I’ and ‘a’?” Krystal challenges, and her mother’s lips quirk upward but she doesn’t respond, so Krystal thinks she’s won. 

“Morning Leighanne,” her father greets cheerfully from where he’s concealed behind the morning paper, nose buried in the crossword, “figure it out, sunshine?”

“Queue,” Krystal announces, “q-u-e-u-e, except that’s dumb and it should just be ‘q’ ‘cos the last four letters are silent.” She proclaims it with the certainty only an eight-year-old can muster and her father laughs, deep and throaty, and Krystal beams. 

“She was hanging upside-down from your pull-up bar,” her mother sighs, “under the impression that it would make her  _ think _ better.”

“Well she found the word, didn’t she?”

“ _ Rick _ .” Krystal exchanges a weary glance with Theo, because that’s her mother’s  _ you’re-in-trouble _ voice, and her father looks up guiltily from where he’s hidden. They stare at each other for a long time, and Krystal knows they’re doing that  _ thing  _ that adults do where they talk with just their eyes, and she wonders when she’ll be able to understand it. Finally, he sighs, and looks at Krystal sternly. 

“No more hanging upside-down, sunshine,” he tells her, “we don’t want you to fall and get hurt.” Her mother makes a pleased little noise in the back of her throat and Krystal nods, and when her mother isn’t looking her father winks at her, a secret little thing, before hiding his face behind the paper again. 

Krystal looks at Theo, and he wags his tail. 

He won’t tell mom. 

“I’ll see you two later,” her mother announces, kissing the both of them on the head before hurrying out the door. She goes to church on Sunday, but Krystal and her father stay home and watch cartoons and work on the crossword. Sometimes Theo tries to help, but his  _ boofs  _ don’t translate very well to english. 

“I was almost there before mom told me,” Krystal swears, “the hanging was helping!” Her father grins at her and ruffles her hair and Krystal leans into his touch, completely at ease. There is no reason for her to feel unsafe around her father. 

“I believe it,” he tells her, placing the paper down on the table so she can study it with keen eyes, raking over the little boxes and hints. She leans over and scribbles in  _ Ukraine  _ in thirty-three down and  _ England  _ in twenty-eight across.  

She’s clever, even if people don’t think she is. 

Her mother thinks she’s wild, shakes her head at her fondly and calls her  _ crazy _ , bouncing all over the place and hanging upside-down, always chattering too quickly, obsessively disclosing whatever fact it was she discovered that day. Her teachers call her  _ difficult _ , always talking over them in lessons because sometimes she doesn’t realize she’s being so loud, and she just gets  _ excited _ , and they shake their heads at her, too―though less fondly than her mother―and tell her to settle down. 

(A boy in Krystal’s class called her  _ spazz _ , once. She punched him in the face, fist formed just like her father showed her, and then he called her  _ crazy bitch _ , but after that, he left her alone.)

Krystal’s father calls her  _ sunshine  _ and ruffles her hair and lets her help him with the morning crossword and always listens to her whenever she’s babbling on about something new. Her doctor calls them  _ special interests _ , but Krystal finds  _ everything  _ interesting, so it’s hard to settle on just a few. 

People assume that she isn’t smart because she likes pretty things and letting her mother paint her nails and having her father braid her hair, assume that she isn’t smart because her eyes are always moving and her legs never seem to stop swinging. They assume she isn’t strong because she’s a girl, because her limbs are long and willowy and her hair is long and easy to tug at. 

People assume a lot of things about Krystal, but they’re hardly ever true. 

She’s clever, even if people don’t think she is. Strong even if they don’t expect her to be. She’s a happy little surprise like that. 

“Forty-two down is  _ testosterone _ .” Her father blinks up at her slowly and then squints down at the paper―he’s forgotten his reading glasses―and then hums softly. 

“Well whaddya know?” he teases. “You’re right, as always. Thanks, sunshine.”

He passes her a donut from the box on the counter and Krystal munches on it happily, swinging her legs in the free space underneath the chair. Theo waits loyally by her side to catch the crumbs as they fall. 

They do this every Sunday morning, the two of them. 

Krystal can’t leave until it’s finished, the whole thing, otherwise it’s all she thinks about for the rest of the day. It’s practice, she thinks, but for what she doesn’t know. Her father just tells her that it’s important, so she does it, and it’s  _ fun _ . 

“Hey dad?”

“Yeah sunshine?”

“Why do we always do this?” she asks, because once the question is in her head she can’t just  _ ignore it _ , but then she quickly goes to clarify. “Not that I don’t think it’s fun! Because it’s really fun! I was just wondering why.”

He smiles at her and fills in another word, and then Krystal fills in eighty-nine across,  _ galapagos.  _

“It’s an exercise in critical thinking and patience,” he tells her, “two things that you’ll need throughout your life. I’m not a scientist or a mathematician, but I know you can never trust anything at face value, and I always want you to be able to find the truth of the matter, to look  _ beyond _ .” 

“And crosswords help?”

Krystal’s father is a journalist, and she thinks he’s one of the smartest people in the whole world. He’s always telling stories, always filling her head with things it didn’t know before, and she thinks he’s  _ brilliant _ . He, more than anyone, knows what it’s like to have to dig for truth. 

“I think they do, yes. It’s a good way for your mind to stretch.”

Sixty-three down is  _ detective _ , and Krystal pauses. “Finding truth is like being a detective, right?” Theo  _ boofs  _ and thumps his tail against her chair, almost like he’s answering her question, and she passes him a bit of her donut without thinking about it. 

“I guess it is, yes.”

“I want to be a detective, then,” Krystal decides, again with the matter-of-factness that only an eight year old can muster, not knowing that somewhere else in the world that role is already getting ready to be filled. Last week she wanted to be a veterinarian, and the week before that an artist, and the week before  _ that  _ an acrobat in a travelling circus. 

She thinks that detective might stick, or at least pieces of it will. 

She  _ does  _ have a basset hound, after all. 

“You can be whatever you want to be,” her father promises her, voice warm and gravelly and as fatherly as one would expect a father’s voice to be. Krystal beams up at him and swings her legs underneath her chair and Theo thumps his tail along with her, sensing her excitement, “we have to finish this crossword first, though.”

Krystal peers at it, looking for the words her father has missed, and shakes her head fondly, pursing her lips, legs still swinging underneath her. 

“Seventy-nine down is  _ evolution _ , dad, how could miss that one?” He laughs and ruffles her hair before filling it in, and Krystal smiles, leaning into the touch, and hums happily to herself. 

On the floor, Theo wags his tail, and Sunday marches on. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! hope you enjoyed! comments and kudos are greatly appreciated, they keep me young, keep the content flowing. 
> 
> as always, you can prompt me or just hang out on my tumblr, danaryas
> 
> have a wonderful day! <3


End file.
